Quicksand

Tanizaki proffers a story that poses as a confession given to the author (with occasional interventions by the narrator) about a woman who becomes obsessed with the beautiful art student Mitsuko and gets lost in the lies the lovers weave to deceive themselves about love.

Love, like any narrative--Tanizaki seems to be saying--is multilayered, devious, mannered and obsessively self-referential. Love is an interrogation of the stories we tell each other, or a succumbing. It is a question about the veracity of our lies. The lesbian affair Mrs Kakiuchi has with Mitsuko, and Mitsuko's complicated arrangements with her fiancé and Mrs Kakiuchi's husband, do not allow for easy moralisms. This is a novel of observation, in which Tanazaki reserves comment and allows the characters to play out the fate they have chosen by denying their bourgeois concerns and buying into the danger of passion. As ever sex and death are linked, with the possibility of ritual suicides present at every turn. We are left wondering whether death is the height of orgiastic success, the failure of life in love, or the erotic commingling of the two. --Mark Thwaite

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